Y  A  N  N  I  C  K     D  E  M  M  E  R  L  E
Yannick Demmerle's principal subjects are forests he has explored. In the series "Les Nuits Étranges" (Strange Nights), he presents mural-sized nocturnal images of a German forest shot with an 8 x 10 camera from the forest floor. A few slender, branchless tree trunks, softly illuminated by an unseen moon, dominate each image. The silvery light clarifies gnarled bark in the immediate foreground, but the rest of the forest quickly drops off into the thick, enveloping night. A note of the sublime is summoned by the photographs' impressive scale and subtle, provocative lighting, which invite us into close, physical communion with the shimmering trees, yet ultimately leave us on the brink of a forbidding, unknowable darkness.